One thought on “American Racial Classifications”

1. In and around the Washington DC area there exists a large community of Nigerian-Americans. They are people who born in sub-Saharan Africa, who went through the struggle of getting to the United States and becoming American citizens. My first wife and I knew a several people from this community, and the one thing that struck us about us was how many of them refused to be called “African Americans.” They didn’t want the association with American-born “African Americans” because they regarded the latter as being lazy, indolent, and bent on living off the work of others (their view, not ours).

   I have my own angle in ethnicity, which I haven’t pursued for a number of reasons. Based on my sister’s painstakingly researched and documented genealogy of our family, I am most assuredly of Irish, Geerman, and Scottish heritage. Yet a number of years ago, a doctor who had run a blood panel on my remarked that my red corpuscles were of a very distinctive type found only in either Native Americans or Black Irish. He remarked that I had either had a relative that had bumped ugly with a Cherokee (for example), or was a descendent of Black Irish whose origins are completely unknown other than having genetics found only on the Iberian peninsula. The Indian connection is right out. according to my most thorough sister, leaving me to being, in some very remote way, Hispanic.

   I’ve toyed with the idea of genetic testing, but don’t want my genome (or that of my biological family) available to Chinese or other malefactors.

   In any event, I know that my genome is dominated by the Irish-German components, because I suffer from the Curse of My People: eveery payday, I get really, really drunk, then invade France….

Comments are closed.